I have been setting up my new laptop this week, which involves replacing all of the windows programs with free or open source utilities and adding bits and pieces that are useful. I think I’m about done, and my list so far looks like this:
Utilities
- AVG Free anti-virus – Anti virus
- CDex – CD Ripper
- OpenOffice – Complete Office suite
- Filezilla – FTP Program
- FreeMind Mindmap program
- NoteTab – Plain text editor
- Sunbird – Mozilla calendar software
Internet
- Free Download Manager – Download Manager for Firefox
- Firefox – Web browser
- Flickr Uploadr – For uploading photos to flickr
- Pretty May – For recording Skype calls
- Skype – Voice over Internet utility
- Telus Roaming Wizard – For dialup connectivity to my ISP from the road.
Media
That’s pretty much it for now. Most of these programs are old friends. I am trying out Pretty May, Switch and Sunbird (which I like alot). Audacity does a fine job of converting files to mp3s so Switch might not be needed, but Switch comes with a bunch of great little utilities that are worth playing around with, including a nice voice recorder.
In case you are wonder what John Heron, the author of The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook, is now up to, check out his work at the Centre for Spiritual Inquiry in New Zealand. There are some really remarkable resources there.
I bought a new laptop last Friday – and Acer Aspire 5570 – and I’m finally happy with it, but it took a few days. THere was an annoying problem with poor sound and DVD performance, that seemed as if there was a big elephant hoggin memory somewhere. I tried dozens of solutions and finally found this guy, who tried everything I did too, except he solved the problem:
What I did to fix it was to go to the HARDWARE part under the SYSTEM options (Control Painel). Under the IDE Controllers part I had PRIMARY IDE and the INTEL one. What I did was right click and select UNINSTALL on the IDE one… When I rebooted the whole machine was way faster, specially sound playback. Under the IDE Controllers I still get the same icons (Primary IDE and the Intel one) but I’m 100% sure that this was the cause of the fix.
It worked for me as well, and everything just hums now.
[tags] Acer, Aspire, sound problems[/tags]
Found in some email conversations lately, three systemic methods for communicating well:
Photo by Susan NYC
Peggy Holman just sent me my copy of the Second Edition of The Change Handbook, the definitive reference for large scale systemic change processes. The second edition is much different from the first, covering much more territory than simply methodologies and approaches to change (although it does that amazingly). The book contains 68 chapters written by some 95 contributers (including yours truly as well as fellow blogger and friend Nancy White), and extends the investigation of these methods in to some of the areas that Peggy and I and others have been looking at for the past few years, including new forms of organization and what change means in the 21st century. It’s a monumental effort, a tremendous resource of inspiration, ideas and a definitive “state of the field.”
Between the covers of this book you will find articles on dozens of tools, including the ones I use like The World Cafe, Appreicative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, ICA Technology of Participation, divergent-emergent-convergent design, Cirlce practice, dialogue and many others.
The publication of the second edition will be accompanied by a gathering in March at Bowling Green University in Ohio. Called “Nexus for Change” the conference will bring together most of the contributers in the second edition and anyone else who is interested for a few days of dialogue about where to go from here. There is a small possibility I’ll be there, if my schedule loosens up.
The book will be widely available from the publisher and the usual slew of online book stores
[tags]changehandbook[/tags]